It is well known that electronic components, when they are energized and consuming power, produce heat that in most instances must be actively removed by means other than simple radiation-dissipation to the surrounding environment. Additionally, increasing rates of data throughput and bandwidth may result in higher power densities, thereby increasing the amount of heat that is produced and that must be removed.
Many industrial and military applications use fans and/or blowers to convectively remove the heat produced by energy consuming electronic components. These fans are normally hard mounted onto the chassis or housing that contains the electronic components. Mounting the fans on the housing however can create noise problems, since the vibration or structure-borne noise from the operating fans may be transmitted to the electronic components, the housing for the electronic components, and the surrounding environment. This is particularly the case for certain fans, such as COTS fans, which experience excessive vibration that causes increases in structure-borne noise. Indeed, any small high speed fan produces an excessive structure-borne noise signature.
In some applications, such as military submarine platforms in which stealth is required, it is critical to prevent the transmission of this structure-borne noise from the fans to the surrounding environment. Consequently, military standards such as MIL-STD 740-2 detail the measurements and limits of structure-borne vibratory noise. Therefore, whether it is a military application or an industrial application, it is desirable to isolate as much as possible the structure-borne noise of such fans.
However, as with many problems that confront engineers, there are trade-offs that must be considered in addressing or solving a particular problem. In the art of convectively cooling electronic components for example, there are trade-offs in the design of electronic components and the structurally integrated enclosures (SIE) that house those electronic components. One such trade-off is designing for both maximal thermal performance and noise damping. That is, systems and designs that permit excellent thermal removal may exacerbate, or at least not diminish, vibratory noise of the system. For example, gaskets used in prior art systems tend to actually reduce isolation, and may also introduce short circuit paths for cooling air to escape before it passes into the component housing and flows over the electronic components. Moreover, prior art gaskets do not dampen structure-borne noise all that well, at least not without a substantial redesign of the component housing.